


Soul's Toxicity

by KivaEmber



Category: Neon Genesis Evangelion, Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor 2
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-14
Updated: 2013-08-14
Packaged: 2017-12-23 11:41:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/925970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KivaEmber/pseuds/KivaEmber
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the end, he became a human.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Soul's Toxicity

**Author's Note:**

> An old fic I wrote ages ago of Yamato in the role of Rei. It sticks with the original Evangelion line, but it's a short oneshot. I love doing oneshot crossovers way too much, eheh.

Life began abruptly. Well, there were lives before this, but they weren’t  _his_  lives, but the lives of his successors. What was right, what was wrong, what was this and that. Years upon years of trial and error, finally accumulated into a final product. Him.

_You know your directive,_  it was said to him, within seconds of life. And he said  _yes, yes I know_.

Yamato knew.

 

* * *

 

JP’s tool was a being called Alcor. Or Al Saiduq amongst humans. They were the same. Aberrations. Alcor gave the necessary materials for his many births, and final, complete one. Yamato supposed he should be grateful, but he wasn’t ordered to be thus, so he felt nothing.

_Your soul seems to be elsewhere_ , Alcor said to him once.

Yamato didn’t understand that. Souls were what powered the Evas. He could feel them when he settled in Unit 02. Yamato required none for that reason. His soul would not exist, not hidden in some far corner.  That was fact. He was soulless.

The fake souls in his Eva were repulsed by him, because of this. Even though they were artificial souls they were repulsed by him. They protected and obeyed him just to get him away faster. Aberration. Not even the abominations against God could tolerate his existence.

He said as such to Alcor once. He never knew why. The urge just slid to the forefront of his mind one day.

Alcor had just stared at him for a long while and said nothing.   

 

* * *

 

Third Child – Hibiki Kuze. The one they had been waiting for a while. He fits the criteria, the criteria, the criteria. Yamato was told to supervise. Lead him the right way, lead him to where his mind would crack and let the insides lay bare. Let him-

But that was Alcor’s job too – not yet, not so soon, but Yamato had to start breaking apart the surface.

Humans maintained their forms due to AT Fields – it was a projection of their soul that maintained individualism. This individualism birthed souls, and souls birthed humanity – chaos and pain and anguish and happiness and love. You could never break AT Fields just by lashing out at it. The harder you struck, the more indestructible they became. You had to do it  _lightly_.

Lightly.

Yamato Hotsuin met Hibiki Kuze before Unit 01 –the Herald – and said  _I am Yamato Hotsuin, the First Child_.

He had practiced that line for proper inflection. He even practiced smiles. Humans were more at ease that way.

Hibiki Kuze had only looked wary.

 

* * *

 

Yamato’s body was human, his soul was nothing, and his essence was of Alcor’s.

Perfect trial and error had ensured that Yamato would follow the plan to its conclusion. There was no room inside of him for the things that made humans unpredictable and chaotic. He was a hollowed out shell whose ultimate fate was to become the trigger for Lilith’s rebirth. He knew this and accepted this. He felt nothing regarding it. It was his end.

Which was why this was a bad thing. Hibiki Kuze was wary of him, but he still engaged him with odd things Yamato didn’t understand.

_Do you like to read?_

What does it mean to like something?

_Don’t you eat actual food? You can’t live off of supplementary pills and rations!_

What was actual food?

_Do you have a favourite musician? Brahms would probably suit you._

Why?

Yamato felt nothing in regards to others – was incapable of it. His soul did not exist. He was a vacuum. He was empty.

He should be empty.

 

* * *

 

When it was time for Alcor to engage Hibiki Kuze, Yamato felt like he had been filled with boiling LCL. He didn’t know the cause of it. The end was in sight, the final cracking of Hibiki’s Self within their grasp – that was the plan. Although Alcor would say that with an odd smile, that carried no mirth or anger and instead something far too old for Yamato to even begin to comprehend.

It was the plan for Alcor to worm inside Hibiki’s fragile human heart; weakened by the near death of one Daichi Shijima, the catatonic state of one Io Nitta, and the obliteration of half of Tokyo-3 in recent events. It would be easy. Humans were soft, and it only took a light touch to dig your claws under their flesh and peel it open.  

It was the plan.

But Yamato felt like he was choking in his LCL. Sitting in his Eva for recalibrations and tune ups, he could see Alcor and Hibiki conversing in the hanger, on the catwalk not far from him. He could not see what they were talking about. He couldn’t read lips. He didn’t want to. The LCL frothed.

It boiled in his lungs when Hibiki smiled back at Alcor – who imitated a picture perfect smile in response.

Like he was human or something.

 

* * *

 

_Your soul seems to be elsewhere_.

It had turned to tar. Yamato felt hatred.

 

* * *

 

Jealousy was something that Yamato was beginning to understand. Hibiki seemed entranced by Alcor, and why wouldn’t he? He shone. He was awkward in humanity, but he possessed enough of a soul, and enough lifetime experience, to navigate such dangerous waters. They were entranced in each other.

_He is so exceptionally… human_.

That was what Alcor said.

_You’re smitten with him,_  Yamato said in response, and Alcor just smiled enigmatically, and Yamato felt like his blood and turned into mercury. Poisonous and agonising and he wanted to ram Alcor’s face into the dirt until it was reduced to blood and pulp.

So Yamato did nothing. He crawled in Alcor’s footsteps like the empty doll he was. No, not empty. He was too full of something, but it was black and sticky and more monstrous than human. Orders rattled inside of his skull but he had no urge to fulfil them mindlessly. This was dangerous. Yamato wondered if he should die. He wanted to. He would go back to that pleasant dollness of emptiness.

But that frightened him more than dying, suddenly. So he did nothing. He sat and stewed and followed the plan even though he wanted to just rip everything out of him.

He probably would have if purchasing power tools didn’t have an age restriction.

 

* * *

 

Alcor was disgusting. For all of his love and admiration and pathetic imitation of humanity, he didn’t imitate the most important part. He couldn’t imitate free will or courage, and Yamato sat in his Eva filled with vindication and rage. His head buzzed and screamed – or that may be Hibiki, howling with an animal like rawness that made Yamato want to stick his thumbs against his eyes until they popped.

_Make sure no one interferes_ , Yamato’s orders were. Delay arrival into Central Dogma. Hibiki had to be the one to, the one to, and Alcor had to give into his weakness, to die. That was the plan. Yamato’s role was to ensure it followed its tracks.

But everything was hot and boiling, and Yamato was too small for the thing inside of him. It was shards of Self that were crammed into him, sharp points jabbing out until Yamato felt like a pile of broken glass. He did not listen to his orders. He went into Central Dogma.

While Hibiki hesitated. Yamato did not.

While Hibiki screamed, Yamato’s hand clenched tight around Alcor.

While everything went red yellow black red in Yamato’s head, where he could feel everything begin to bend under the weight of something terrible, Alcor just smiled and said

_…—-_

Before with a squelch and crunch Yamato turned him into messy pulp.

 

* * *

 

Hibiki’s fist was hard and fast, but Yamato tolerated the blow well. He didn’t even feel it. Hibiki just clawed at him mindlessly after that, grabbing at his plugsuit, yanking, smacking his hands against his chest, letting out noises like some dying animal, before he was on the floor curled up on his feet and Yamato just stood there with a stone in his stomach.

Something was wrong.

He left Hibiki to his misery. Yamato’s hands were warm and wet but when he looked they were dry and pale.

He could see red in his peripheral but he did not understand it. Just saw Hibiki’s eyes, flashing with grief and asking  _Don’t you feel anything_  accusing him of being a cold monster. It was true. A monster. Yamato was an aberration, and for the first time in a long while, the chaos in his mind was soothed.

Follow the plan. That is your purpose.

Yes.

 

* * *

 

When Yamato reached the public bathrooms he spent twenty minutes throwing up in the toilet. The acid remained and it hurt so much Yamato wanted to cry.

 

* * *

 

Yamato couldn’t even remember what his true purpose was anymore.

Hibiki was catatonic. How did this come to be? It didn’t matter. JP’s was in destruction, being obliterated from the inside out by other humans. They were like that – chaotic. Destructive. They would eat themselves into nothingness if it was possible for them to do so. Disgusting. Terrifying. Yamato carried that chaos inside of him.

Operating the Eva with an unresponsive pilot was impossible, and Unit 01 was not his. The soul within was disgusted, and it fought and struggled with him as he piloted it in Hibiki’s stead, the other pilot nestled on his lap and head lolling against his shoulder. The world outside was an inferno. Bombs and fire and explosions that shone purple and made his vision eat away into blackness.

But Yamato had to. He had to. Not from orders, but because of something else. Everything was disintegrating, and Yamato reached an odd tranquillity within him. There was no tar, no hatred, no nothing. Tranquil. But not empty. He understood why Alcor smiled as his death came down on him. He understood why

Hibiki had screamed.

Emotions were terrible things. Yamato understood why the Instrumentality Project was even a thing. Yamato had felt nothing but misery when Hibiki had dragged his Self into being. Hibiki was his true creator, but he was a cruel one, and left Yamato staggering blindly and alone. Yamato hated him. He hated him enough that he wanted Hibiki to survive this end of the world to live with it.

Even if Yamato had to drag his catatonic self out of a warzone in a stolen Eva.

But when Yamato did good things, they turned bad. When Yamato did bad things, they turned worse still. From the moment Yamato took his first breath in this world, he was condemned by God, and he was fine with that. His Karma was poisonous, and his soul followed suit, rotting from nothingness into disgustingness.

There was no hand to smite him as Alcor had been smote. There was only himself.

 

* * *

 

Or so Yamato believed.

Judgement came in the form of twelve white angels, with mouths full of fangs and hands full of claws, red lances slicing through his AT Field like it was paper. Yamato fought. The end of the world, he and Hibiki had to survive it. But the Eva was not his, and it locked him to feel everything it felt, when they took his eyes, when they took his limbs, when they buried their hungry maws into the guts and tore them to pieces.

Hibiki was silent and Yamato was screaming until the final lance pierced deep into the core.

 

* * *

 

In the end Yamato realised that he became not a monster but a human.

It was a terrible fate to be met, and Yamato now understood why Alcor wished to die.

He realised all of this in the few seconds given to him. When the lance pierced through, Yamato had shoved Hibiki further down the cockpit. He didn’t know why he did that. He could have saved himself. He could have done anything. But everything hurt. And Hibiki had to live to suffer like him.

In his last few seconds, Yamato realised that he had been doomed from the start.

_Your soul seems to be elsewhere_.

His soul had been there from the start. A poisonous, traitorous thing.

 

* * *

 

When Yamato did something good, it turned into bad. When he did bad, he did worse still. Hibiki lived.

And the world became red. 


End file.
